Edward Steichen

Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times

Edward Steichen, who died in 1973 at 93, was recognized in his lifetime as one of the great photographers of the 20th century. Yet with his penchant for changing directions and playing multiple roles, he bequeathed too many Steichens for easy classification.

Steichen excelled in all his photographic ventures — in ''pure'' art, fashion and advertising, portraiture, nature, combat, even as a powerful director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York . His detractors suggested that he also became a brand name, famous for being famous.

Born in Luxembourg in 1879, Steichen was still a toddler when his parents migrated to the United States, eventually settling in Milwaukee. There, in his mid-teens, he became an apprentice lithographer and took up photography as a hobby. But his first love was painting, and it was this that prompted him to travel to Paris in 1900.

Painting is ever present in his early photography, especially the influence of the Impressionists. He achieved those effects by blurring his lenses with petroleum jelly or manipulating his negatives and prints in the darkroom.

In New York, Steichen founded the Photo-Secession group with Alfred Stieglitz, 15 years his senior, and contributed to a quarterly called Camera Work. And it was thanks to Steichen's Paris connections that Matisse, Rodin, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and other French painters were first introduced to America at Stieglitz's Gallery 291, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Steichen's pictorialist period ended in 1917, when he joined the United States Army and created an aerial photography unit in northern France to gather intelligence about artillery positions and troop movements behind enemy lines. After the war, Steichen's lifelong interest in horticulture resulted in near-abstract images of flowers, plants and insects, but a more crucial watershed came in 1923, when Condé Nast hired him. For purists like Stieglitz, Steichen was selling out to commercialism. Yet he would soon make his name as the first modern — and Modernist — fashion photographer, interpreting fashion and celebrities in a style that would influence later generations.

Steichen had the instinct of a communicator who was supremely confident in his eye as an artist. And if he was criticized for using art to sell clothes and magazines, he saw no reason to apologize.

''I don't know any form of art that isn't or hasn't been commercial,'' Steichen said in old age. After all, he added with no small immodesty, Michelangelo also liked to be paid well for his work.

A survey of Steichen's work in fashion and portraiture (“Edward Steichen: In High Fashion: The Condé Nast Years, 1923-1937”) is on exhibit at the International Center for Photography through May 2009.